The Dayton Agreement put an end to sport in Bosnia, but Kosovo was coming into season; and in 1998, Zilic was operating there also, claiming to be suppressing the Kosovo Liberation Army, in fact concentrating on rural communities and some seriously interesting looting.
But he never neglected his real reason for allying with Slobodan Mibosevic. His service to the despot had paid rich dividends. His "business" dealings were a gangster's charter, the right to do what every mafioso has to dodge the law to achieve and yet do it with presidential immunity.
Chief among the franchises that paid dividends of several hundred percent were cigarettes and perfumes, fine brandies and whiskies, and all forms of luxury goods. These franchises he shared with Arkan, the only other gangster of comparable importance, and a few others. Even with sweeteners for all the necessary police and political "protection," he was a millionaire by the mid-nineties.
Then he moved into prostitution, narcotics, and arms dealing. With his fluent German and English he was better placed to deal with the international crime world than the others, who were monolinguistic.
Narcotics and arms were especially lucrative. His dollar fortune entered eight figures. He also entered the files of the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the FBI.
Those around Milosevic, fat on embezzled money, power, corruption, ostentation, luxury, and the endless sycophancy to which they were subjected, became lazy and complacent. They presumed the party would go on forever. Zilic did not.
He avoided the obvious banks used by most of his cronies to store or export their fortunes. Almost every penny he made, he stashed abroad but via banks no one in the Serbian state knew anything about. And he watched for the first cracks in the plaster. Sooner or later, he reasoned acutely, even the awesomely weak politicians and diplomats of the United Nations and the European Union would see through Milosevic and call "time out." It happened over Kosovo.
A largely agricultural province, Kosovo ranked with Montenegro as all that was left of Serbia 's fiefdoms within the Yugoslav Federation. It contained about 180,000 Kosovars, who are Muslims and hardly distinguishable from the neighbouring Albanians, and 200,000 Serbs.
Milosevic had been deliberately persecuting the Kosovars for a decade until the once moribund Kosovo Liberation Army was back in being. The strategy was to be the same as usual. Persecute beyond toleration, wait for the local outrage, denounce the "terrorist," enter in force to save the Serbs, and "restore order." Then NATO said it would not stand by any more. Milosevic did not believe them. Mistake. This time they meant it.
In the spring of 1999, the ethnic cleansing began, mainly accomplished by the occupying Third Army, assisted by the Security Police and the paramilitaries: Arkan's Tigers, Frankie's Boys, and Zoran's Wolves. As foreseen, hundreds of thousands of Kosovars fled in terror over the borders into Albania and Macedonia. They were supposed to. The West was supposed to take them all in as refugees… But they did not. They started to bomb Serbia.
Belgrade stuck it out for seventy-eight days. Up front, the local reaction was anti-NATO. Behind their hands, the Serbs began to mutter that it was the mad Milosevic who had brought this ruin upon them. It is always educational to note how the war fever fades when the roof falls in. Zilic heard this muttering.
On June 3, 1999, Milosevic agreed to terms. That was the way it was put. To Zilic it was unconditional surrender. He decided the moment had come to depart.
The fighting ended. The Third Army, having hardly taken a casualty from NATO's high-altitude bombing inside Kosovo, withdrew with all their equipment intact. The NATO allies occupied the province. The remaining Serbs began to flee into Serbia, bringing their rage with them. The direction of that rage began to move from NATO to Milosevic as the Serbs contemplated their shattered country.
Zilic began to slip more and more of his fortune beyond reach and to prepare for his own departure. Through the autumn of 1999 the protests against Milosevic grew and grew.
In a personal interview in November 1999, Zilic begged the dictator to observe the writing on the wall, conduct his own coup d'etat while he had a loyal army to do it, and do away with any further pretence at democracy or opposition parties. But Milosevic was by then in his own private world, where his popularity was undiminished.
Zilic left his presence wondering yet again at the phenomenon that when men who have once held supreme power start to lose it, they go to pieces in every sense. Courage, will power, perception, decisiveness, even the ability to recognise reality-all are washed away as the tide sweeps away a sandcastle. By December, Milosevic was no longer exercising power; he was clinging to it. Zilic completed his preparations.
His fortune was no less than 500 million dollars; he had a place to go where he would be safe. Arkan was dead, executed for falling out with Milosevic. The principal ethnic cleansers of Bosnia, Karadzic and General Mladic of the Srebrenitsa massacre, were being hunted like animals through Republika Serbska where they had taken refuge. Others had already been snatched for the new war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Milosevic was a broken reed.
As a matter of record, Milosevic declared on July 27, 2000, the coming presidential elections for September 24th. Despite copious rigging and a refusal to accept the outcome, he still lost. Crowds stormed the Parliament and installed his successor. Among the first acts of the new regime was to start investigating the Milosevic period: the murders and the 20 billion missing dollars.
The former tyrant holed himself up in his villa in the plush suburb of Dedinje. On April 1, 2001, President Kostunica was good and ready. The arrest team moved in at last.
But Zoran Zilic was long gone. In January 2000, he just disappeared. He said no goodbyes and took no luggage. He went as one departing for a new life in a different world, where the old gewgaws would have no use. So he left them all behind.
He took nothing and no one with him, save his ultraloyal personal bodyguard, a hulking giant called Kulac. Within a week he had settled in his new hideout, which he had spent over a year preparing to receive him.
No one in the intelligence community paid attention to his departure, save one. A quiet, secretive man in America noted the gangster's new abode with considerable interest.
12 The Monk
It was the dream, always the dream. He could not be rid of it, and it would not let him go. Night after night he would wake screaming, wet with sweat, and his mother would rush in to hold him and try to bring him comfort.
He was a puzzle and a worry to both his parents, for he could not or would not describe his nightmare; but his mother was convinced that he had never had such dreams until his return from Bosnia.
The dream was always the same. It was of the face in the slime, a pale disk ringed with lumps of excrement, some bovine, some human, screaming for mercy, begging for life. He couldn't understand English, as could Zjljc, but words like, "No, no, please, don't," are pretty international.
But the men with the poles laughed and pushed again. And the face came back, until Zilic rammed his pole into the open mouth and pushed downward till the boy was dead under there somewhere. Then he would wake, shouting and crying, until his mother wrapped him in her arms, telling him it was all right, he was home in his own room at Senjak. But he could not explain what he had done, what he had been a part of, when he thought he was doing his patriotic duty to Serbia.